Blog - Page 76
A collection of 2,507 blog posts
The other day, I was at the gym with my co-founder Joel and we started a short discussion about other products as part of Buffer’s product offering we might enjoy building one day. We went through various problems we’d enjoy solving, like online payments, social media monitoring and so forth. At one point, we got into some light brainstorming of one of the areas and the name of a related, prominent startup in the space came up. I said “I know the founder.” That line had nothing to do with the
Do you remember seeing your first emoticon? The first documented use of “:-)” dates back to 1982, when Scott Fahlman proposed that it be used as a “joke marker” on a message board for Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists. Here’s his Internet-changing message: “I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: “:-)” Read it sideways.” Today, emoticons need a bit less explanation. As social media has grown (and character counts have shrunk), these pictorial representa
I’m excited to write the very first Buffer update of 2015, which is also going to our new Series A investors following our transparent funding round. Welcome to our new investors, and thank you so much once again for joining us on this journey! The latest Buffer metrics: * 2,002,495 total registered users (+3.5%) * 168,455 monthly active users (-1.4%) * 40,430 average daily active users (-0.40%) * $421,787 monthly recurring revenue (+3.0%) * $5.06m annual revenue run-rate (+3.0%) * $2,0
To kick off the first #Bufferchat of 2015, the Buffer team joined in as guests for a chat focused on goal setting and tracking tips and tools. With personal improvement as one of our 10 company values, it is a topic near and dear to our hearts. Check out the full Storify recap here. What are your goals for 2015? * Sunil: “Personal goal for 2015: Would love to bring back meditation as a habit again. Last year was on and off for me. Also hoping to eat healthier, w/ more protein and reducing t
If you’ve ever suffered from writer’s block, procrastinated when you supposed to be writing, or criticized your writing too harshly, this post is for you! Blogger and app developer John Saddington of @DeskPM recently joined us for Bufferchat to discuss writing tools, habits books and more. Catch the full Bufferchat recap on Storify here! What writing tools are essential to your routine? From John: * The first, I use a # of web tools. MediaTemple for hosting a lot of my personal blogs. And
Many of the social media tips we share—the ways to create a marketing plan from scratch, how to get more followers, how to get more clicks—often focus on the small business side of social media marketing. Now imagine achieving social media success when the brand you’re trying to promote is you. Personal branding on social media is a topic we’d love to dive into a bit deeper, starting with this overview of tips and strategies. I’m grateful to have found a number of useful tips on how building a
Towards the end of 2014, Buffer co-founder Leo Widrich came back to his family home in Austria for a visit and was able to join the coworking community space sektor5 for a fireside chat about Buffer’s culture, values, transparency and lots more. The audience at this event asked tons of smart questions, so we thought it would be fun to share the answers with you here. What’s Buffer? Where are you right now? Leo: We are a social media management tool. We help people to publish, schedule and an
This post originally published on May 15, 2013. We’ve updated it here with the latest, newest information, screenshots, and videos. The retweet function has been a favorite way of ours to give appreciation and acknowledgment to the tweets we love. And we’ve often wondered: What happens when we love a lot of tweets? Or when we find an awesome tweet at an odd hour? Being able to schedule your retweets gives you an awesome opportunity to show your support and engagement for other people’s tweets—
What are your digital marketing goals for the months ahead? If you’re looking to increase your content’s social shares (as so many of us are), we’ve got some amazing new research to share on how to create an ideal outreach strategy for your industry. BuzzStream and Fractl have collaborated to give you a jumpstart on optimizing your outreach for social traction. We analyzed 220 high- and low-engagement websites from 11 major verticals that produce content. The result? A roadmap for planning fo
For the last 2 to 3 years, about every day, I would wake up, open my laptop and type the letter “g” into the Google Chrome bar and hit enter. Chrome would auto-complete it to “growth.bufferapp.com”. It was like a daily ritual to check on Buffer’s growth numbers from a number of different angles. Revenue, new users, daily actives, monthly actives. Growing—increasing our monthly revenue, our traffic, our user base—was the No. 1 priority in my mind. It only hit me very recently, about four months
One of our favorite ways to improve our results on social media is to try new things. We dream up a new idea or research a possible change in strategy, we test it out, and we see what happens. The testing phase is one of the most important stages for us—not only the “what to test” but also the “how to test.” We’re grateful to have learned some helpful lessons about testing best practices as well as a host of ideas of what to test in our social media marketing. I’m happy to share with you what
We find that self-improvement and reading go hand-in-hand. Many of the books we seem to grab at Buffer tend to be related to our current tasks, our new ideas, our passions and pursuits, or even just a nice sampling of good writing and entertaining topics to keep us tuned in and engaged. We end up reading a deep and wide assortment of inspiring stuff. As a team, we read 656 books in 2014. I’m happy to share the 19 most popular ones from our reading list. Note: One of the neat perks we have o
Hey there! Since this post was published, we’ve updated the Buffer values. See the updated values here. There are a few things I can count on when I tell someone about what it’s like to work at Buffer. If I stick to talking about what our social media scheduling tools do, I know I’ll probably have a fun conversation about the triumphs and challenges of social media. If I talk about Buffer’s culture and values a bit, a whole different conversation emerges. I’ve gotten a wide variety of r
You want to be the world’s best online writer, a David Ogilvy of the blogs, a Shakespeare of the social media. Or maybe you just want to be good enough to get by on freelance writing. Where do you get your education? How do you improve? I’ve faced these same questions, and I still face these questions as I aim to keep improving as an online writer. I majored in journalism in college. There wasn’t a content marketing course back in the day. Everything I’ve learned has been self-taught. And I
“So, when is this content marketing thing supposed to kick in, exactly?” As a marketer, you’ve likely heard about how great blogging and content marketing is for driving leads and results. So you dive right in: you work hard, brainstorming and writing article after article, hoping that it has some effect, that it’ll move some needle somewhere. Content marketing can be hard. It takes time and you might make a lot of mistakes along the way. The good news: You get to learn from those mistakes an
About 3 months ago, we made a very exciting change at Buffer. Upon exploring our current setup as a company, and after Joel’s discovery of a truly transformative book titled Reinventing Organizations, we decided that we wanted to reinvent Buffer taking some inspiration from the book. At its core, we’ve switched to a fully self-managed, self-organized team. There’re no managers or bosses and everyone on the team is encouraged to work freely on projects they are most compelled to work on, that th
I have a lot of things I want to accomplish in the upcoming year. Some of them are really small things (like learning to make hashbrowns, a breakfast food that has confounded me for years) and some are really big, like learning to live a more minimalist life. In the past, I have begun each new year with great intentions but found following through really difficult—like many of those who create goals for the new year. I think that’s because change is hard. We all want to improve and become bett
The end of each year is always one of my favorite times. I love the reflection that comes along with the close of a time period, and the hope that comes with looking ahead. I also really enjoy all the best-of lists that tend to accompany the end of a year. Browsing through them, I realize how many things I’ve missed throughout the course of the year. It’s great to have a chance to catch up! If you’re afraid that any of Buffer’s most useful social media marketing blog posts might have slipped b
One of the best ways I’ve found to learn new things on social media is to try new things. We experiment, we make mistakes. We succeed, and we fail. And we get a better feeling for how things might work and the best strategies, ideas, and experiments to try next. I’ve had the privilege of trying out a number of these new strategies and experiments this year, learning tons about the best way to share on social media. I’d love to share with you what I’ve learned! Keep reading for my list of the
Social media expert Rebekah Radice joined us for Bufferchat to look back at social media trends in 2014 and look ahead for the best tips for your 2015 strategy. Check out the full Storify recap here! Why is a social media strategy important? From Rebekah: * A social media strategy allows you to be intentional and strategic, giving you focus and purpose. * Strategy m
Templates and tools can help you work smarter and save you time and help your efforts go further. Buffer’s Kevan Lee shared his best tools, tips and tricks for his blogging and social media strategy at our weekly Twitter chat, #Bufferchat. Check out the curated Storify recap here! What tools or apps do you use on a daily basis? From Kevan: * Buffer to create and schedule social media posts. WordPress and Canva to create blogposts. * I’m always keen to try new things! SpruceApp has been a
A lot of thought, scheduling and tools go into making sure we give each Buffer customer and community as happy an experience as possible. Right now, there are a total of 7 Buffer Happiness Heroes and Weekend Warriors (plus our Chief Happiness Officer, Carolyn) all across the world helping customers nearly 24 hours a day. And we’re looking to grow the team! That’s in addition to all our other team members, who usually devote at least a few hours each month to diving into delivering some custome
When I can find the time to do so, I love to plan ahead. I’ll write out tomorrow’s to-do list. I’ll add ideas to our content calendar. And I’ll schedule the next day’s social media updates—or even the next week’s, if I’m feeling ambitious. Maybe some day I’ll get to the point of scheduling a month or even a year ahead! Scheduling part of your social media content in advance is well worth it. And I’ll be happy to share with you some strategies, tips, and tools that can help you get organized a
There are days when I spend loads of enjoyable time writing new blogposts, creating images to share, and checking analytics, and then when I’m just nearly ready to close the laptop and sign off, I remember: I need to schedule social media posts for the next day. Or, I need to follow-up with mentions. Or, I need to curate some content. Or, I need to do one of the myriad tasks of a social media manager, and wouldn’t you know it I’m just about out of time. Saving time on social media is a big goa